


too similar to tolerate, too different to exonerate

by lackingsoy



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Oppression, Protective Jason Todd, Trust Issues, a study on character morality, about murder, anyways jason todd says ACAB, jason and damian: twinsies!, jason is brown, jk jk but uh um also not really, siblings! siblings! siblings!, this was a good thinking exercise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29837583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: Some people, when they've died and rotted and gone, leave the world a modicum more livable.
Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Damian Wayne
Comments: 4
Kudos: 64





	too similar to tolerate, too different to exonerate

When Nightwing dials in to tell him Damian had run off, low and panicked, Jason isn’t surprised. Or worried. Storming out of the Manor is standard stuff; three times in a month is hardly a record, only a nod to Bruce's parenting, bridling, muzzling.

And he knows where the kid is. He tells Dick that he'll take care of it, listens to him make a muted sound of gratitude, and hangs up.

Before he leaves, Jason pops on a domino, a leather jacket, and pockets an umbrella. The rain patters gently on the brick, under the hum of generators, as Jason shoulders his way out of his window _._ He leans outward, breathing in the wet air, relishing the cold humidity fresh on his face, before shooting off a grappling hook.

It doesn't take skill to find him. Mostly instinct and something as tenuous and as infallible as faith. (Jason doesn't know when that happened.) He finds the boy dangling his boots over the apartment that made for a safe house on Wednesdays and Sunday nights, still dressed in Robin's gear, green hood up.

He doesn’t call up for him, only clips the umbrella shut and clambers up the fire escape, gliding quietly over the roof's edge. Jason lands with the mildest of sounds, courteous. If Damian hears him, he gives no indication, unmoved. He looks like a child the way he’s curled up, knees at his chest and arms around them, conserving heat or conserving dignity, who knows. It's a luxury he probably had never been allowed. Talia can hardly be tender. 

Jason tips the opened umbrella over Damian's head. “Trust me, the world’s not gonna stop spinning just because you want it to.” 

Damian takes an obstinate minute glaring at the water before directing his glare elsewhere, towards other roofs. Jason doesn’t need to see the scowl to know it’s there. 

“Why are you here, Todd.” The question is spoken as a demand. 

“Maybe I enjoy getting thoroughly soaked five minutes away from my place." His back is really getting there.

“Grayson hailed you.” Accusing.

"Hardly," Jason replies. "We're not that friendly." On talking terms, and little beyond that.

Damian doesn't look up, just crosses his arms, uncrosses his legs. It makes him look like the thirteen-year-old he is. Jason sits down on the soaked brick next to him. After a long minute: “What happened?”

He’d left enough physical space between them so that the kid wouldn’t feel the immediate need to ward him off. Jason doesn’t look at Damian, just watches the slivers of water striking at the dirt and cement, holds the umbrella over them both. He leaves the question open-ended. 

“Father,” is the kid’s solemn answer, the only one it can be, and how completely anticlimatic that is. 

Jason huffs and inclines his chin, feeling the pellets of cold against his face. "What, did daddy ground you again?” 

“If he had, I wouldn’t be here.” Damian says through gritted teeth, steel an unkind fiber in his voice. “I would be punching degenerates.” 

“Try me,” says Jason. 

This causes the boy to startle. If you call it that--the infinitesimal shift of the head. “Todd,” Damian says. Pauses. Struggles. Tries, “That is not what I meant.” The steel falls away, replaced with a defensive scowl.

Jason hummed, unbothered; a petulant reminder that had been, maybe. One of them has to keep the other on their toes. Ensure a safe distance. "Well. You wanna deliberate on it?” 

At that, Damian falters, scowl diminishing into bleak lines. The kid turns away. Jason keeps the umbrella over him and waits.

“I killed.” 

Damian is already looking at him when Jason turns, bitterness tangling together with horribly suppressed anger (and regret?) on his child's face.

A kid. His little brother.

Jason doesn't ask why.

He says, “Bruce knows," and watches as Damian’s eyes harden. It tells him enough, when he doesn't refute it. It's probably why Damian had sought him out. Perks to being the only other killer in the family. There is a certain intimacy to shared transgressions. A common derivative. To know what it means to drive a blade into a person's body, precise and exact, and know with certainty that they will have died by your hands. 

But a child, knowing that.

There is no resistance when Jason reaches an arm across those small shoulders and tugs Damian closer, against his own side. Damian shudders as if to cry. Jason knows he won't, because he's been trained out of it, they've both been. Conditioned into priceless combatants, serving in other people's wars. 

He closes his eyes and levels his breathing, enforcing a steady rhythm. Damian settles slowly, folding against Jason's chest, and that really says something, doesn't it--to seek something steady in him of all things. Jason absentmindedly rubs his thumb into Damian’s shoulder as he readjusts the umbrella, supposing that they’d both end up with colds after this, that Alfred might just have his head. He eases Damian into his relatively dry coat, his undershirt growing uncomfortably wet.

\---

A shower and a change of clothes and two cups of white rose tea, honeyed and hot, later: “Why does Father treat you the way he does,” saying so like it's actually kind of unfair, this side of insulting. 

The question doesn’t prompt Jason from his perch on the couch, where he’s nursing his own cup of tea, god sent from Alfred. Though, it does induce a snorting sound from the back of his throat, and Jason blinks away from the swirl of steam. 

Damian looks at him, eyes red as if he's managed to cry sometime between slipping through the window and disappearing into the bathroom. Jason knows what he's asking.

“You were taught to kill. I was taught to be better," he decides to say. It is half-true. Surviving as a brown teenager in the streets of Gotham, sitting with hunger, chewing on his nails, sleeping under benches, fighting off rats and adults with oily eyes--it had all made the touch of a knife's hilt feel like safety. It had made gripping a gun and flipping off the safety feel powerful. So what if Talia had put firearm after firearm into his hands. He would've found a way eventually. He'd learned efficiency from one of the best, and going lethal was time-efficient, cost-effective, ground-breaking.

Living with Bruce's radio silence is worth the trade. They have lived with each other's ghosts already; staring into each other's face like looking into the eyes of failure, hauntings mundane and habitual. Jason can live as a warning, foreboding.

“Omission will get you nowhere, Todd,” Damian says.

"Tsk, tsk, I'm allowed my secrets," and here he sips at his tea, watching Damian through the side of his eyes. He flaps a nonchalant hand, sighing. "Bruce wants you to be like him. Morally-speaking. Wants to, hm, show you how to live another life."

Damian's face flattens. "Another life." He repeats. 

"It's not impossible," Jason says, trying not to sound like he's making an argument. He tries to make it sound simple, even though it is not simple, even though there is no such possibility for someone like him. He speaks both out of experience and innate knowledge of alienation, of permanent otherness. "That's why there are rules. Boundaries."

Damian considers this, hands cupped around the mug, brows twisted up. He frowns deeply. "You still haven't asked." He looks up, eyes narrowed like he might pick the truth off of Jason's face. "Why."

Jason swirls his cup like a flute of shitty champagne. "Don't need to."

A breath too sharp. "Why. Is that a boundary?" Sneering, almost. Angry, scared, traumatized, mostly. 

"I could care less," Jason answers, slow. "Because at this point, you've learned all the ways in which to be nonlethal, and so when you choose not to be against Batman's direct orders, there must be a very good cause."

It is--trust, Jason supposes. A brand of trust that is the bane of Bruce's beliefs, that goes against the impossible ideal of Batman. Whereas Damian has lost it with Bruce, he gains it, with Jason.

It is a concession. Damian looks as if he's been struck with the brunt of it. Jason imagines it must be a difficult thing to reconcile--losing trust with Bruce, but not with him. He has never claimed to make things easy. 

Jason waves a hand, appearing for all semblances, unaffected. "Bruce wants to give you other options. To make sure you have them." If Bruce wants to forge a different life for Damian, Jason can hardly begrudge him for it. Can't. That is the point to all of this, the crux of it, the heart.

"The choice is yours," he says. He watches the scars on his hands, his knuckles, stark against the brownness of his skin. Stun batons, sedative darts, zip-ties. All were options, alternatives, safety objects. Gracious, nearly. Damian's eyes are on him, heavy, and Jason thinks about telling him that prisons, cops, the courts--they don't do shit. The law is useful only for barely legal loopholes, each and every one exploited down to the penny. He has many reasons to avoid Commissioner Gordon and the Gotham PD.

Jason wonders what kind of person Damian had killed. Wonders how old they both had been to understand that some people stop being people with what they've done. That some people will look at other people and never see anything more than a body, a commodity, a tool, a toy, a future exploit. That some people will always think they have the right--to rape, to murder, to displace, to extort, to rob, to oppress.

That some people, when they've died and rotted and gone, leave the world a modicum more livable.

If Jason can expedite that process--well. He will. He always will. It is the only gift he's got, for the little one he had grown out of, for the kids he's found mutilated and starved and abandoned and propositioned for lives of soldiering, assassination, prostitution, slavery, poverty. For all the people who have known the incredible horrors of monsters and despots, of opportunists and big pharma and multinational conglomerates. 

So. Jason doesn't regret the blood on his hands. Not when it wrenches people free, conceives a permanent relief.

He can live with murder. That, Jason supposes, is the most basic difference between Bruce and he.

"I choose, every day, to kill." Jason levels his eyes at Damian. "That answer your question?"

Damian looks at him like he's seeing somebody else, strange and new. A flicker of recognition, maybe, a streetlight flashing shadows down in the pit.

"I understand," he eventually says, with this kind of immense care that makes it sound greater than it is, softer. Kinder.

"You're thirteen," Jason tells him, "You shouldn't." Then points at his mug, God forbid Alfred. "Now finish your tea."


End file.
